ਨਾਭਾਨਾਭਾ

Nabha is a historic city in Patiala district of Punjab, India, founded in 1755 by Hamir Singh of the Phulkian dynasty and long the capital of Nabha State. The 2011 census counted 67,972 residents. Its Hira Mahal palace recalls the princely era, and its workshops build combine harvesters for farms across India.

Where is Nabha?

Nabha is in the south west of Patiala district, about 25 kilometres west of Patiala city, at 30.37 degrees north and 76.15 degrees east, on the flat plain where Malwa meets the Puadhi speaking country east of the Sutlej. It is a subdivision and tehsil headquarters of the district, governed by a municipal council, with the PIN code 147201. Roads run from Nabha to Patiala, Sangrur, Malerkotla and Bhadson, and the town serves a wide farming hinterland in the fertile Pawadh tract.

History: the founding of a Phulkian capital

The ruling house of Nabha belonged to the Phulkian family, the Sidhu line that traces itself to Phul and his son Tiloka, and that also produced the ruling houses of Patiala and Jind. Hamir Singh, a descendant of Tiloka through Gurditta, founded the town of Nabha in 1755. In 1763, after joining the Sikh chiefs who defeated the Mughal governor at Sirhind, he was confirmed in the territories he had taken, and Nabha State came into being with its capital in the new town. The state was never one compact block: it began as twelve scattered tracts lying among the lands of its Phulkian cousins.

The rajas built their capital to match the claim. The fort, the palaces, the royal cenotaphs of the Shahi Samadhan and the planned streets of the old city belong to this princely building age. By 1901 the state covered 966 square miles, with four towns and 492 villages, administered in three nizamats: Amloh, Phul and Bawal, the last a southern tract near today's Haryana border, gained after 1857.

British protection, deposition and reform

In 1807 and 1808 the ruler of Nabha obtained British protection against the expanding power of Maharaja Ranjit Singh across the Sutlej. The arrangement was tested in the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845 and 1846, when Raja Davinder Singh was judged sympathetic to the Sikh Empire: a quarter of the state's territory, including the Amloh estates, was confiscated, and the raja was deposed in favour of his seven year old son Bharpur Singh. Bharpur Singh stayed loyal in 1857, forwarded the British a loan of two and a half lakh rupees, and was rewarded with the Bawal territory. At the Ambala Darbar of 1860, Nabha, Patiala and Jind were promised exemption from the doctrine of lapse.

The long reign of Maharaja Hira Singh, from 1871 to 1911, is remembered as the state's building age, and in 1911 he took the title of Maharaja. His son Ripudaman Singh, who had sat on the Imperial Legislative Council as heir apparent and moved in nationalist circles, brought social and judicial reforms and set up a Legislative Council for the state. His involvement in nationalist and Sikh politics brought him into conflict with the British, and on 8 July 1923 he was forced to abdicate. His removal became one of the grievances behind the Jaito Morcha of the Akali movement. Nabha State acceded to India in 1947, joined PEPSU in 1948, and in 1956 PEPSU itself merged into Punjab, leaving Nabha a subdivision town of Patiala district.

Geography and people

The 2011 census counted 67,972 people in the Nabha municipal council, up from 62,000 in 2001 and 54,421 in 1991: 36,528 men and 31,444 women, a sex ratio of 861 women for every 1,000 men. The town covers about 20 square kilometres, a density of about 3,399 people per square kilometre. Scheduled Castes numbered 10,316 residents. Of residents aged seven and above, 52,478 were literate, an effective literacy rate of about 86 per cent, and about 23,900 residents were recorded as workers. Punjabi is the language of the town, spoken in its Puadhi form, and the surrounding villages grow the wheat, paddy and fodder that feed Nabha's grain market and its workshops.

Places of interest

The Hira Mahal, the palace associated with Maharaja Hira Singh, is Nabha's best known building, standing in its grounds close to the old city; a photograph of it was already being published as a face of the state in the Mahan Kosh of 1930. The town's fort, recorded by the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities as an 18th to 19th century structure about a kilometre from the bus stand, anchors the old royal core, and the Shahi Samadhan holds the cenotaphs of the ruling family. Gurdwara Siropa Sahib was known in the princely period as a keeping place of historical Sikh relics and artefacts. Around these stand the gates, bazaars and planned streets of the old capital, and beyond them the combine harvester factories that are the modern signature of the town.

Notable people

Hamir Singh, the founder, remains the first name in Nabha's story. Maharaja Hira Singh gave the state its palace age, and Maharaja Ripudaman Singh gave Punjab one of the causes of the Akali movement. The town's greatest gift to Punjabi letters is Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha (1861 to 1938), born at Sabaz Banera village, who served Nabha State for years, among other posts as tutor to the young Ripudaman Singh, and who died at Nabha. His Gur Shabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh, published in 1930 after some fourteen years of work, was the first encyclopaedia of Sikh literature and is still the reference work scholars reach for. He carried the town's name as his own, and the name has carried the town across the Punjabi world ever since.

Getting there and Nabha today

Nabha has its own railway station on the Rajpura to Bathinda line of Northern Railway, and buses link it through the day with Patiala, Sangrur and Malerkotla. Today Nabha works as a subdivision headquarters, a grain market and an industrial town in one. Its workshops were among the pioneers of combine harvester building in India, and makers based here, among them firms founded in 1988 and 1995, still send self propelled and tractor driven combines, straw reapers and other farm machines to buyers across India and abroad. The princely buildings now share the skyline with factory sheds, but the order of the old capital still shows in its streets.